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From the Nokia Conversations blog, comes this great piece of creative that tells the company’s sustainability story in Beijing. The film style has a journalistic feel to it; for some reason to me, reminiscent of the BBC. If Nokia were to make similar videos throughout its global operations, it could have a nice library of stories that communicate the values of its brand.

This type of storytelling is what we call in German “die Oberfläche”, and is meant as a gentle snapshot of a company’s operations without much detail. For reporting purposes, it serves as an excellent tool when looking closer at specific markets (in this case). For an extreme example of video reporting done well on a budget, see this HKBN CSR Report.

I found this chart by Ethical Corporation to be an interesting segmentation of disciplines in sustainability and CSR

Now although individuals obviously specialize in specific areas, there’s two job types that need an exposure to and basic knowledge of all: chief officers and communications professionals.

via Perrine Bouhana

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Produced by Xplane for an Economist magazine conference in November, this video brings together a variety of facts and figures around climate change using animation and music, in what I can only call a creative confluence of hope and a subtle call to action.

- via Cool Infographics

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Full 85min Video Available On Demand - “Sustainability” isn’t just a nice thing to do. It’s a powerful source of business value, an organizing principle for strategy, and a remarkable driver of innovation at every level of the enterprise. And it’s all about design — of products and services, value propositions and contracts, buildings and production lines, marketing campaigns and incentive systems, and the daily conversations that are the life of your business.

Join Gil Friend, CEO of Natural Logic and author of the acclaimed The Truth About Green Business (FT Press), as he explores how your company can harness 3.85 billion years of R&D — and a commitment to a world that works — to drive innovation, profit and meaning.

Sustainable Brands Boot Camp –13 week online training series designed to teach professionals strategies for building business and brand value through sustainable innovation. Taught by leading experts, topics include market drivers, business model and product innovation, supply chain partnerships, brand strategy and marketing, metrics, and more. Available live and on-demand. Find out more: http://bit.ly/sbbootcamp

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Janine Benyus, author of the book “Biomimicry”, speaks extensively about the topic in this great presentation.

Earlier this year I bought myself a copy of John Thackara’s “In the Bubble: Designing in a Complex World”, to get a glimpse of what this designer/futurist had to say about sustainability and society. While published in 2005, the content didn’t seem a bit dated as some business and trend books usually do. In many regards, I’d compare the book to “Natural Capitalism” for its contributions of highlighting social/environmental issues and solutions. But what Thackara also does is mix in storytelling, history, trends, potential future scenarios, philosophy, and criticism in such a manner that gives the reader a circular view of what’s going on, without placing heavy emphasis on normative ideas.

Many times in my book reviews I go through the various chapters, highlighting the main points. That hasn’t been easy with this book as it relates to many subjects, some of which readers will already be familiar with and for which further detail won’t be necessary. So at times my writing will more take the form of notes, rather than flowing editorial.

Lightness

Reference to physical weight reduction for process-related energy expenditures (and by that token carbon footprint); systems thinking; adequate provision, consumption, and replenishment of five capitals (natural, social, human, manufactured, financial); eco-efficiency principles of natural capitalism; low material/energy intense solutions; service design instead of ownership; design for easier disassembly leading to increased chance of up/recycling.

Speed

Increased consumption rates are associated with faster-paced, more dynamic lifestyles. The big issue is acceleration. Speed isn’t free. Eco-efficiency gains need to be balanced out in future innovations developed for the same end results. Previously, society operated much more on event/personal time (kairos) versus clock/public time (chronos). Religious calendars had periods of slowness (like Lent, Advent, Ramadan) for a reason. For improved lives, we need to move from real-time to more quality time. Trend examples: slow food, slow cities. Thankfully we tend to live slower as we get older, and with time more people are becoming 50+. Another trend is downshifting life (less money but more flexible time for quality living). The early internet theory of disintermediation’s mass effect on economics and transactions guided by techno invisible hand not entirely true. Trust and social interaction/relationships are still highly important. The telephone is still a very fast and time-effective means of conducting business and developing relations. Japanese word for trust cultivation: Nemawashi - laying the groundwork; process by which groups in Japan develop the shared understanding without which nothing much gets done. “If trust is established it takes  less effort to reach a consensus in regard to any issue.” Trust can’t be digitized.

“Acceleration weighs us down. Always on means seldom free. But the design challenge now is not to design slow systems to replace fast ones…but to enable situations that support an infinite variety of fast and slow moves - at a rhythm dictated by us, not by the system.”

Mobility

Car use versus trains/planes is high. Consider the quantity and quality of time spent in mobility. Actual time = transport + transaction/maintenance time. Logistics is the lifeblood of living operations. While going from Make-to-Build to Make-to-Order and RFID (radio frequency identification) have improved systemic efficiency, large supply networks also have costs in energy (carbon footprint) and materials (packaging/other) from transport and 3rd party warehousing. Solution ideas: 1) Think more, drive less, intermodal transport 2) Substitution; telepresence (like web conferencing) is good, although imperfect for social reasons 3) Move from faster to closer.

Locality

Networked & diverse cities/regions are more resilient and able to take care of their economic and food needs as conditions change.

Situation

Work and living spaces need to be better designed (physically and spiritually) for higher qualities of life.

Conviviality

While the dictionary meaning is “Fond of feasting, drinking, and good company”, John talks in broader terms of human health (physical and social). Solution examples include improved health care systems, barter/noncash trading exchanges, and connected communities of practice/interest. While not mentioned, some of these solutions have come to see the light of day through enabling technology including Freecycle, Craigslist, Meetup.com, Upcoming.org, Tweetups, and the like. For examples of cultural aspects we should consider retaining or designing for, see cultural universals as discussed by George Murdock, among others.

Learning

Too much content; little time to think. “Learning is about the acquisition of new skills, including social ones - not just stockpiling of facts.” eLearning’s history has seen its hype, failures, and re-considered potential. Although to be viable for users, tech support is critical. Increasingly there are shared learning opportunities in corporate/organizational education through wikis and other (social) knowledge management systems. Personal interaction remains important though as part of the learning process, in addition to flexible time management. “New geographies of learning need to be based on redesigned configurations of space, place, and network that respect the social and collaborative nature of learning - while still exploiting the dynamic potential of networked collaboration. We need to design the spatial configuration of education so that it connects communities and learners that, right now, tend to be separated from one another.” Also important are the role that projects play in learning to construct and collaborate; students should help design them too, not just be dictated by the teacher or syllabus. “Technology becomes interesting when it facilitates new kinds of interaction among teachers, students, and the external world - and this does not need to be expensive. To get the most out of technology and networks, new skills and attitudes are needed - and these either are free or can be taught.” These include search & evaluation skills, learning how to be found and how to link, editing, communicating, and organizing all kinds of digital media. Different ways to share & experience knowledge. Assessment (self and guided). Mentors. Mass collaborative learning, wikis. Property rights and commons. Playtime and games; effect of modeling and simulation upon learning.

Literacy

Info overload isn’t the problem. “It’s the unfiltered, unsorted, and unframed…lacking mechanisms to select what’s important. Design task is to make information digestable.”

Smartness

Thackara’s law: “If you put smart technology into a pointless product, the result will be a stupid product.” Law of diminishing amazement (LODA), “The more fancy tech you pack into a product, the harder it becomes to impress people with its benefits.” John goes on to talk about the silliness of some “smart appliance” concepts, and goes on to extol biomimicry. The most important property of future materials is Lightness (to make, to operate/use, to recover, to recycle). Goes on to discuss how advanced sensors and computing yield adaptations to changing conditions in systems. Yet with pervasive computing, people will always be smarter because complex calculations can’t always take ALL variables into account. Personal example: internet ads can sometimes be highly irrelevant and sometimes disrespectful because circumstantial and contextual information is unavailable for conditional logic. HCI (Human-Computer Interaction) design is difficult and can often reduce UX (user experience) satisfaction for a significant percentage of people, if personal interaction options are completely taken away.

“The transition to a light and sustainable economy means moving from an economy of transactions - selling and buying things - to an economy in which the quality of services, not the acquisition of goods, becomes our measure of well-being.” John questions the viability of techno-dependent, ambient intelligent future. Quotes from James Woudhuysen, former manager of research for Philips, “in new technology, systems are more prone to being incompatible than to matching up with each other.”

Flow

John ends the book with the following seven transition frameworks:

1) Blueprint and Plan to Sense and Respond

“Being responsive to events in a context and being able to respond quickly and appropriately when reality changes. This implies that we develop an understanding and sensitivity to the morphology of systems, their dynamics, their “intelligence”- how they work and what stimulates them.” Desired outcomes aren’t static. By understanding why a system is in one state, we can explore the kind of interventions that would nudge it into another more desirable one. This means designing as steering. From thinking of ourselves as authors of a finished work, toward facilitators to help people act more intelligently, in a more design-minded way, in the systems we all live in. Going from designing on the world versus designing in the world. Design in such a framework becomes a process of continuous observation, measurement, and feedback.

2) From High Concept to Deep Context

“Small changes to interconnecting subsystems can make things better, but they can also make things worse. This is why the application of “high-concept” design to contexts we barely understand is irresponsible and probably counterproductive.” Systems are complex; we need to appreciate that and design our man-made ones in that we act lightly, sense feedback, and act again.

3) From Top-Down Design to Seeding Edge Effects

Interconnectedness and the ability for small changes to occur from within -> Dexterity. “To find out what’s happening on the edge, we first need good peripheral vision.” We need to spot opportunities at the juncture between industries; to imagine relationships and connections where none existed before; above all, we need to look in new places for inspiration, because most solutions will involve new alliances and new connections.

4) From Blank Sheets of Paper to Smart Recombination

We need to reuse and recombine actors, ideas, and organizations. The challenge is to innovate by learning from the world.

5) From Science Fiction to Social Fiction

Enhance daily life. The important point when envisioning scenarios of human activity is to distinguish explicitly between what Ezio Manzini calls disabling and enabling solutions. Human interaction is important. Service design sweet spots occur at intersection of latent social needs, open systems, smart consumers, and smart companies.

6) From Designing For to Designing With

Collaborative design, ethnographic research, user-centered design, open innovation, and agile development.

7) From Design as a Product to Design as a Service

And that about does it for today. John’s book is 226 pages and is a worthwhile read for its philosophical inquiries.

From the Global Footprint Network comes this info from their latest newsletter:

Introduction

One the eve of the Copenhagen climate conference, Global Footprint Network is releasing data today that reveals a widening gap between human demand on ecological services and what nature is able to produce. It would now take nearly one and a half Earths to generate all the resources humanity consumes and absorb all our CO2 emissions, according to the latest Ecological Footprint and biocapacity calculations. These figures are based upon source data from 2006, the most recent year for which such data are available.

The data show that humanity’s demand on the biosphere for providing natural resources and absorbing carbon dioxide emissions is nearly 50 percent greater than what nature can provide. This ecological overshoot means it now takes approximately 18 months for the Earth to regenerate what we use in one year. The urgent threats we are facing today - most notably climate change, but also biodiversity loss, shrinking forests, declining fisheries and freshwater stress - are symptoms of this trend.

“The future will be shaped by these resource limitations, so, it’s clearly in the self-interest of every country to transition quickly from carbon and resource-intensive economies to the economies of the future.” Global Footprint Network President Mathis Wackernagel said, “While international agreements are critical, many nations are not taking a ‘wait-and-see’ approach, rather they are investing now to take advantage of the world’s demand for renewable energy and clean technology.

Who Uses What

Every year, Global Footprint Network calculates the Ecological Footprint of the world’s nations and humanity as a whole, and compares that with biocapacity, the amount of resources nature is able to produce.

The data show that in 2006, the most recent year for which data are available, humanity’s Ecological Footprint grew almost 2 percent from the year before, and 22 percent from a decade before, due to both rising population and per capita consumption. At the same time, biocapacity has not increased, and may even have fallen slightly.

The average Ecological Footprint per person worldwide is 2.6 global hectares (6.5 global acres), while the average biocapacity available per person is 1.8 global hectares (4.5 global acres.)  But some countries’ level of ecological demand per person is much higher than world average, and some is much lower.

The United Arab Emirates has the highest Ecological Footprint per capita, 10.3 global hectares (26 global acres). The Emirates adopted a national Ecological Footprint Initiative in 2007 and has been working to reduce its Footprint. Along with investing billions in renewable energy and other sustainability initiatives, UAE researchers and government agencies are working with Global Footprint Network to identify policies that could significantly cut the country’s per capita Footprint.

The average American has an Ecological Footprint of 9.0 global hectares (23 acres) – the size of 17½ American football fields. The average European has a Footprint of 4.5 global hectares, half that of the average American, but still well above both the world average and what is available per person.

On the other end of the scale are Malawi, Haiti, Nepal, and Bangladesh with Footprints of about half a global hectare (1.25 acres), in most cases too small to provide for basic food, shelter and sanitation.

Click here for a bar graph of Ecological Footprints by Nation

Population is another critical factor driving overshoot. The productivity of our ecosystems has not kept pace with increases in population. The result is that as our numbers expand, the amount of biocapacity available per person shrinks.

The U.S. now requires 23 percent of world biocapacity, while China – which has a much lower per capita Footprint but over four times greater total population – requires 21 percent. Together, China and the U.S. require almost half of all human demand on nature’s services. China’s resource use is rising at a much faster rate due to population growth, suggesting it will soon surpass the U.S. in total consumption, although the U.S. remains much higher per person.

Methodology

The 2009 Account calculations are the most detailed ever performed, using about 6,000 data points from U.N. statistics per country per year. This year’s edition has limited the number of published countries to those that have robust data sets. To produce results for the remaining countries, Global Footprint Network welcomes additional research with those countries’ statistical offices to produce meaningful, consistent data sets. Such collaborations are already underway with a number of countries (www.footprintnetwork.org/reviews).

Changing the Curve

Despite these sobering findings, there are key opportunities to change our trajectory. “Even as world leaders have acknowledged that an agreement at Copenhagen is out of reach, governments we work with from Ecuador to the United Arab Emirates are seeing the importance of taking bold unilateral action.”

“Once city, country and business leaders realize that the best way to remain competitive and prepared for the future is to make the policy decisions and drive the technological innovations we need to live within nature’s means, we will begin to change these trends,” Wackernagel said. “The good news is that, many governments we work with are moving forward to reduce their Ecological Footprint, no matter what happens next month in Copenhagen. These leaders realize the longer they wait, the greater the risks to their economies and their citizen’s well-being.

• Download the National Footprint Accounts 2009 data tables (hectares)
• Download the National Footprint Accounts 2009 data tables (acres)
• Download the 2009 Ecological Footprint Atlas for full Ecological Footprint and biocapacity results for more than 100 nations.
• Visit our Data and Results for graphs by country, supporting resources and further information.
• Learn about licensing National Footprint Accounts data.

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Neat integrated campaign apparently from TBWA France, that uses creative art to bring about awareness of carbon footprints while asking people to cut back on certain activities. Started earlier this year, the campaign was supposedly spread around to other French offices, but doesn’t seem to have been taken up by other international agency offices. The potential could have been neat for a major agency, although they’d probably need to have more employee-generated art, tips, and photos to have REALLY taken off. [http://www.carbonfighters.org/]

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Interesting play on green marketing from CSX Trains, using air quality and messaging on comparative fuel efficiency from rail freight. In the past, intermodal transport (rail and truck) had been longer delivery times than trucks alone by about 2-4 days, although a logistics friend of mine had said the difference is now 0-2days difference. The important factor is of course total distance (price being equal). In slower economic times, delivery times are less important, so it goes without saying that rail transport should increase if logistics managers and 3rd party schedulers are inclined to use it.

I hope to see more awareness of rail being a preferred “green” option.

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Good ‘ole Bill lays down his thoughts on sustainable design from the regenerative school of thought in this one hour lecture. While I’m quite familiar with it, I thought I’d share it with you here since it’s a very inspirational philosophy and view of the world that “can be” - aligned with nature’s closed-loop systems where waste is equal to food. Although quite alluring, at times the ideas therein can appear lofty, utopian, and impractical precisely because they address systems design at a macro level (although solutions can address the micro as well). What I think you’ll enjoy though beyond the various examples and inspirational visions he portrays in his slides and stories (as is the case with most of his talks you’ll find on the web), is his deep philosophical dive into eco-effectiveness (cradle to cradle) versus eco-efficiency.

At the heart of that juxtaposition is the debate over incrementalism versus radical re-design. The right approach to use will always depend on the context though. Bill frames the argument as choosing to be “less bad” versus becoming neutral or positive. That can particularly be the case when toxicity is an element of the design situation.

Nonetheless, the principles of regenerative design and closed-loop systems are an essential framework to sustainability - so I hope you’ll take away something not only thought-provoking, but also from which you can draw upon in a critical analysis.